This is a blog advocating the overturning and/or ignoring of the controversial IAU planet definition that demoted Pluto, the adoption of a broader planet definition that includes all dwarf planets, and the chronicling of worldwide efforts toward these goals.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Once again, the planet that was originally discovered through a fortunate series of circumstances and subsequently recognized as a new prototype for a third class of bodies orbiting our Sun (and likely other stars as well) has surprised us. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to search for rings around Pluto found something else, something unexpected: Pluto has a fourth moon!

The tiny moon is the smallest of the Pluto system, estimated to be 8-21 miles in diameter, and is located between two of Pluto's other small moons, Nix and Hydra. Interestingly, Pluto's moons, including its large moon Charon, which is big enough to be in hydrsostatic equilibrium, are believed to have formed via an impact between another celestial body and Pluto. If that sounds familiar, it should. The only other moon in our solar system known to have formed like this is Earth's moon.

Observation of this tiny new moon will be added to the agenda of New Horizons, for its flyby of Pluto four years from now.

Dr. Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, marveled at Hubble's ability to see such a tiny object more than three billion miles from Earth. This finding highlights the importance of space telescopes and serves as a reminder that the James Webb Space Telescope, which is in danger of losing its funding, is a crucial need for our continuing to make pioneering discoveries in astronomy.

The notion that Pluto may have more than the three moons we know of has long been discussed, but answers were not expected until the New Horizons flyby. This discovery emphasizes yet again how premature any "reclassification" of Pluto is. It strongly suggests there is much more about the Pluto system we have yet to learn. How can we classify or reclassify something about which we know so little?

The Pluto system is the only one in our solar system in which a small, non-gas giant has multiple moons, which formed in a collision similar to the one that created Earth's moon. We are only beginning to understand this little planet that is truly a "strange, new world."

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Depending on which calculation system one uses, the planet Neptune reached an important milestone somewhere between July 9 and 12 of this year. It has finally completed a single orbit of the Sun since its discovery on September 23, 1846.

For Neptune, one orbit around the Sun takes nearly 165 Earth years!

For most of the 165 years since its discovery, we have known precious little about this distant planet. In 1989, Voyager II changed that by sending back glorious detailed up- close photos of the blue world, which has the fiercest winds in the entire solar system. We saw the Great Dark Spot, a storm akin to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, found thin rings circling the planet, and discovered six new small moons. Neptune was long thought to have only two moons, the large Triton and much smaller Nereid.

The story of Neptune’s discovery is inextricably linked with that of Pluto’s discovery. In the early 19th century, astronomers studying Uranus, which was discovered in 1781, found that its actual orbit did not match the orbit they predicted for it. Uranus’ orbit was “perturbed,” suggesting the planet was experiencing gravitational influence from yet another large object even more distant.

A lot of the same issues we see today in the field of astronomy loomed large in the mid-19th century regarding Neptune. Independently of one another, a young British astronomer named John Couch Adams and a young French astronomer named Urbain Leverrier mathematically calculated the position of the supposed planet affecting Uranus. Both faced ambivalence from the established community of astronomers. Adams tried three times to get England’s Astronomer Royal to look at his calculations and each time was unsuccessful. Leverrier finally turned to the Berlin Observatory with very specific coordinates for where the planet should be found, a feat accomplished within an hour by observer Johann Gottfried Galle.

Later, some astronomers came to believe that Neptune, too, was experiencing perturbations in its orbit, and this notion led directly to the search for yet another planet even further out. It turns out there were no perturbations, just human error in calculating Neptune’s orbit. This was not known until the 1989 Voyager II flyby. Yet the erroneous notion of perturbations directly set in motion the sequence of events that led to the discovery of Pluto, prototype of a third class of solar system planets.

Galle turns out to not be the first person to have observed Neptune. The planet happened to be near Jupiter when Galileo turned his telescope on the giant planet. Neptune actually was recorded by Galileo as a star, probably because it moved so slowly against the other background stars. There is some question as to whether Galileo recognized Neptune as something other than one of the “fixed” stars.

Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, is compositionally similar to Pluto. It orbits Neptune in the direction opposite Neptune’s orbit around the Sun, suggesting it was once a planet in its own right orbiting the Sun directly that was somehow captured by Neptune. Triton is believed to have originated in the Kuiper Belt, driving home the notion that Pluto is not a loner, that there have always been Kuiper Belt planets.

The sequence of events leading to Neptune’s discovery in 1846 also illustrate that the rivalries and personality conflicts so prominent in the Pluto debate are hardly new. The players are different now, but the behaviors are very much the same—professional rivalries between individual scientists, astronomy being drawn into political conflicts between nations (England, France, and Germany in the case of Neptune), and an elitist attitude by “established” scientists when faced with challenging ideas by newcomers viewed as “upstarts.”

While many people know me online as the “Pluto lady” or “Plutogirl,” my first planetary fascination was actually Neptune, that hypnotically beautiful aqua-blue world, when the Voyager II pictures were initially released.I was captivated by the strange, faraway world and still am. I kept every Voyager II photo of Neptune from the headlines and even started painting the planet with watercolor. To this day, images of Neptune, including a painting I copied from the front cover of Newsweek magazine, still adorn the walls of my bedroom.

It was Neptune that first brought me to Amateur Astronomers, Inc., the club I would join many years later. Back in 1989, I did not own a car and had to ask a friend to drive me to the club’s observatory on one of its open public nights. As the volunteers led everyone to the club’s two telescopes for observations, I turned to one of them and specifically asked that he show me Neptune. The stunned volunteer acted as if I had asked to see a planet orbiting another star. In all his years of volunteering, no one had come in asking to view Neptune, he said. My request was not possible.

In retrospect, it is unlikely that no one ever asked to view Neptune. Experienced observers in the club likely had seen it many times while newcomers are usually shown the most common and frequently visible objects, which for planets means Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. More likely, Neptune was not visible from Earth at that particular time.

Twenty years later, as a club member, I finally fulfilled my wish. Through the eyepiece of a member’s telescope, on a clear night, I took my first direct look at the tiny blue dot that was a world that had captured my heart.

About Me

I am a freelance writer and community activist who has worked on many progressive and Democratic political campaigns over the last 25 plus years and a lifelong resident of Highland Park, NJ. I have a BA in Journalism from Rutgers University, an MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard University, and an MEd in English Education from Rutgers Graduate School of Education. An enthusiastic amateur astronomer, I have just completed Swinburne University Astronomy Online's Graduate Certificate of Science in astronomy and am pursuing a Masters of Science in astronomy at Swinburne. I am also an actress with experience in theatre and film and have written a full length play. I am currently working full time on a book "The Little Planet That Would Not Die: Pluto's Story."